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The Clean Water Blog

We All Live Downstream

Making Our Democracy Work Again

At Clean Water Action we believe deeply in harnessing people power to make effective change. Our grassroots organizers are in the field year round connecting people to issues that impact their environment, their health, and their communities. When elected officials hear from the people they represent, our democracy works.

Or least, our democracy used to work that way. Over the last decade we’ve seen the public grow increasingly frustrated with elected officials because voters can’t shake the feeling that their representatives aren’t listening to them.

Here’s the scary thing - voters are right that they aren’t being heard. And do you know what’s even scarier? We know what the problem is and how to fix it, but Congress has been unwilling to do something - until now.

Today is the ninth anniversary of the disastrous Citizens United decision that opened the door to unlimited campaign contributions and unchecked influence by a handful of wealthy donors. This waterfall of dark money has created an unsustainable arms race as elected officials and candidates seek to raise more and more money as the cost of campaigns is driven ever higher. The end result is elected officials that are driven by fundraising needs and beholden to their big money donors.

Our elected officials are listening to their donors and not to their voters.

We see this in our work - deep pocketed polluters have a stranglehold on our democracy, winning regulatory rollbacks with their campaign contributions and preventing action on climate change even though a majority of people in every Congressional district favor taking action.

Solving this enormous problem requires bold action, which is why we are so excited about H.R. 1 The For The People Act. The act is a massive overhaul of money-in-politics, voting, and ethics laws designed to protect the right to vote AND make sure our voices are heard.

H.R. 1 is a chance to ask every member of Congress whether they support fair elections and an inclusive democracy. You can help right now by signing this petition and joining the fight. We need your voice today, but we are going to need you to speaking up to save our democracy from big money interests.